I left a snow-free (but very cold) Devon on the 6.50 train, and as the train headed north it became snowier and snowier and by the time I got to Leeds it was proper snowing, thick snow everywhere and a departures board full of trains running late or cancelled, and lots of people rather nervous about getting home, steaming either metaphorically in terms of their stress levels, or literally in terms of the melting snow on their overcoats.  I then got a train to Bradford which was absolutely packed, and when I got off in Bradford, it was even snowier, thick snow on the ground and great big snowflakes swirling around.  My instructions had been to get a cab to the venue, but once out on the street, it was clear there were very few cars doing anything much other than driving very slowly or spinning round in circles, such was the depth of the snow in the street.

Just then, my phone rang, and there was the organiser of the event to ask where I was in my journey, because the venue had just decided to close due to the weather, and the conference had had to stop.  I had also just had a text from Helen at the Transition Network office to say that Hebden Bridge were getting nervous that many people would be able to make it to their event, so I thought right, there’s nothing for it than going home again, if I can…

By this stage the snow in Bradford was coming down thick and fast as this short film I made on the station waiting for the train home shows (a little taste of the snow for those in the snow-free South West, such as my kids who were who I made the film for originally)….

In the end I got home at 8.30pm, a total of nearly 13 hours on trains.  It did mean that I got a good bit of work done though, but in the end I felt grateful just to have managed to get home.

It is one of those days where, in spite of it being a monumental pain in the arse, what I was left with was a sense of immense gratitude for all the people who keep the trains running, all the guys in the orange jackets along the side of the railway lines trying to unfreeze the points, the train managers who have no idea if they will get home again that night, the people out on the snowploughs, the farmers pulling people out of snowdrifts.  It is all too easy when things are uncomfortable to fall back into self-pity, perhaps it is more useful to hold onto a sense of gratitude to all those who keep it all together (or try to at least).

My lasting image though was of passing a huge out-of-town Tescos somewhere near Sheffield I think it was, with all the lights on and obviously open for business, but with a car park with about 2 feet of snow in it and absolutely no customers at all.  Perhaps the snow is great at showing us where resilience isn’t, but also great at showing us where it is, and the resourcefulness, kindness and determination that can arise from adversity.

You can download a hi-res version for screenings in your local initiative here.

Regular readers will recall from last year my trip to the Positive Energy conference at Findhorn, an extraordinary few days which looked at many aspects of the work starting now in terms of building localised, bioregional infrastructure. Or you may just remember my son’s blog posts which mainly talked about the food, but were hopefully illuminating nonetheless.  Well, it was such a success that Findhorn are running a second Positive Energy event, to run between the 3rd and the 9th of October, and have just produced the first publicity for it, which you can download here.

They introduce it thus; “this is the first electronic flyer for the Positive Energy 2 conference. Further updated flyers may be sent to you as more speakers are added to the presenter roster. A hard copy version of the flyer will be published in around a month’s time. If you would like to receive one or more copies of this, please contact the principal conference organiser, Jonathan Dawson jonathan@gen-europe.org

In light of the major success of the Positive Energy 1 conference, you are strongly recommended to book early for this event, especially if you would like to be assured of accommodation in the heart of the Findhorn ecovillage where the event will be based. Please note that there is a discount for all bookings made before July 1, 2009.”

I am thrilled to be speaking at the conference, as well as the wonderful Richard Olivier, bioregional poet David Whyte, Judy Wicks from BALLE, and Peter Harper from CAT, as well as Caroline Lucas, Richard Heinberg and Pooran Desai of Bioregional via videolink.  Should be great.

Part Two ¦ Part Three ¦ Part Four ¦ Part Five ¦ Part Six

You can also see my introduction to Richard’s talk here.

On the final day of the Positive Energy conference, I took some time out with Joanna to do a short interview for Transition Culture. She has kindly gone through this transcript and corrected any mistakes I have made, so I hope it represents an accurate record. The night before the interview she had had a sleepless night, something she refers to in the interview. In most things I read by Joanna there are sentences that jump out at me and which I then go on to quote at length. Here, I love her reference to the need to become “freed from continually computing our chances of success”…

What has been special for you about this conference for you?

You. And the people who are here. The beauty of the Universal Hall. The coloured lights in the ceiling. The earnestness and the intention of the people stirs me greatly. The willingness, the sense of unpanicked urgency. The deep goodwill. The dancing. The humour. I’m a little uncomfortable with talk about love. “Love?” L.O.V.E. To me its just such an inadequate term, I was lying awake thinking it has become meaningless, but delight… ah! Wonder. Yes.

When we look at peak oil and climate change together what happens is that more and more ordinary people find themselves thrust into positions of leadership. Do we need more leaders, and what are the qualities of good leadership?

I am so moved by the young people here. Like Amanda who introduced Megan (Quinn), and Megan herself, and Kyla, Troy, Rowan…. That you are there doing it for the love of it without seeing the results of your own actions. That you are freed from continually computing your chances of success.

So there is a quality of transparency, of seeing a picture much bigger than the success of this scheme or that scheme. That means you are open to catching the winds that are blowing in this time and ready to improvize at the breaking edge of the moment, inviting novelty of perception and connection, that living pulse. It is rare to see that in a conference.

Are good leaders born or made?

The power to lead is not something you have or are born with, it is something that arises as a function of the relationship. You can’t lead without somebody inviting you to lead. You can’t lead without somebody dancing along with you, behind you. It’s not something in that skin-encapsulated ego, but it is a function of relationships. Then it becomes synergistic.

The leader isn’t someone who knows what’s going to happen, who has the answer, but someone who trusts that the answer will arise, who out of conviction and passion for life takes a step. A leader of that quality would be someone who dares to be a fool, to venture with others, “come, let’s see”. That’s the quality. You remember when the young American Emily Ryan (a conference participant) role-played her possibilities and stepped from behind her computer to be the prow of a ship? It is an invitation. That was beautiful, wasn’t it?

The Bowl of Tears exercise you did was amazingly powerful. Why is it important that we honour and explore our grief for the world before we are able to respond?

I don’t know that I would make it sequential, but our grief, if we are not afraid of it, brings us into full presence to our world. That’s why I want to help people to move beyond being afraid of the despair, grief, outrage, or fear. I want us to move beyond viewing it reductionistically, as a function of some personal pathology. I want us to see the true nature, what I call the Tantric side, of these: that love is behind the grief, that passion for justice is behind the anger.

So when that happens, energy is liberated. It unblocks the feedback loop, so that we can receive the information and respond to it, it unblocks the flow through, then we can be fully there. If we’re not afraid of suffering of our world, then I fear nothing can stop us. It doesn’t mean we’ll succeed, but we can spend ourselves freely and joyously.

One of the tendencies for people involved in this work is overdoing it and burning out. What strategies have you developed to minimise the risk of this in your own work?

Systems thinking. Also seeing that the Great Turning comprises dimensions that are very different in character. We are interwoven in a much vaster response, so that our part of it is just one strand in a moving, flowing tapestry of response. That living systems are built on redundancy, which means that while it is essential that you do what you do, it is also true that there are many others doing similar things. There is not just one Messiah, there are many.

That’s been a tremendous source of resilience for me. Of course we are conditioned by top-down thinking of the Industrial Growth Society, so it’s easy to be lured into the self importance that is the breeding ground for burnout, when we think that what we’re doing is so essential that we waste ourselves. Now I’m prey to that, because we’ve all been conditioned, we’re all scared.

But actually it is becoming easier and easier and you must feel this in the Transition movement, where so many people are joining in who had never even heard of Transition Towns. You are one lovely river. You’re naming it and describing it, but it’s not dependent on you.

When you ran your workshop, you stand doing that work from a place of great power. When you speak you speak with great power, and it seems to me like a time when we need a lot more people able to do that. Was that something you have always been able to do, or did you develop it, and how can we bring more people forward able to do that?

For me, it is a function of how I see people. I can look at them and be afraid of them, and I remember at the beginning I thought ‘they’ll judge me, or they won’t agree with me, and I’ll fail, I’ll make a fool of myself. Because that was such an unpleasant feeling, I chose to see people as bodhisattvas. Here Dharma teachings are so helpful to me.

The early Mahayana recognised that if the Buddha was a bodhisattva in all his earlier lives, and if his teaching about dependent co-arising is true, then everybody is able to be a bodhisattva. We are all jewels in the net of Indra. I can remember the time when I was starting to fall into fear as I walked in to speak to a large audience, and I just thought: “I’m in the company of great noble bodhisattvas. There nothing to fear.” So I am free of trying to persuade them, and can enjoy sharing my experience them.

The Dalai Lama always talks about seeing everyone he meets as a new friend. One of the things I was thinking during your workshop, when there were different characters, is that given that we need to draw in the mainstream, the alternative movement often wants to change the world but wants to keep a distance as it rather disapproves of it. There are some qualities within the alternative movement that are in part to blame for the fact that we haven’t got further than we have got…

There could be a bit of fear, or stereotyping of the people that are in the mainstream. Do you think that is true?

Possibly…

…that the mainstream is resistant, that the mainstream doesn’t care, that the mainstream is indifferent to the fate of the world, that the mainstream is ignorant, that the mainstream will never understand.

In terms of moving more towards the mainstream, given that the Great Turning is the Great Turning for everybody, what things to we need to let go of and what do we need to take with us?

Absolutely let go of typecasting and stereotyping. Recognise your own projection. My way of letting go at that point, when I chose to see people as bodhisattvas was letting was the projection of my self-doubt. Instead I chose to see them as friends in disguise, as allies right from the start. We need people in the corporations and government so they can work from within because we have to dismantle the whole system.

The Shambhala prophecies are very helpful to me in this respect. In the prophecy that Dugu Choegyal Rinpoche taught me, the Shambhala warriors have no uniform, no insignia, they have no home turf, no barricades; they must even go into the corridors of power. We should let go of the notion that people are indifferent or ignorant of the dangers. Now they may actually be, but if I come from that place, I trip all over myself in effortfulness and condescension.

What do you say to people when they say it is too late, we are finished?

I don’t take it seriously. Hopefulness and hopelessness are just feelings, you have them both at the same time. There are perfectly reasonable grounds for feeling that we don’t have a chance of a snowball in hell. But those are just feelings, they come and go, so not to put that much weight on them. Of course you feel that. Of course hope will spring. The main thing then is your intention. What is your intention? The life living through you wants to go on. I don’t think anyone really wants to give up. That might just be an excuse for sloth! (laughs)

What would the Buddha be doing if he were here now at the time of the Great Turning?

The Buddha himself didn’t hang out in the deep forest in the way that the forest teachers of his time did. He taught near the cities, and always in conversation with the people in power–the merchants, the kings, the courtiers and the ministers. He told his followers, “Go forth for the welfare of the many.”

You know I can see the Buddha right here, in this Findhorn conference. He is in you, with your incredible way of opening your students and your colleagues to join in transforming our culture–there’s the Buddha! I see him in Richard Olivier, taking Shakespeare’s plays and bringing them right up to the moment to help unleash our green leadership.

And the Buddha is in Richard Heinberg, as he speaks so exquisitely the First Noble Truth, which is dukkha. There is suffering. There is peak oil, peak everything. He trusts that we don’t have to run and hide our heads, but can move with great dignity and purpose.

Do you have any last advice for people who are reading this as we stand on the cusp of the Great Turning?

To sense the enormous privilege that is ours to be alive at this time, where our lives can matter. Where we make choices. Where in the very danger and darkness of our time we grow such solidarity. Where the play of our imagination and vision can matter supremely. It is a wonderful time.

Scary, and shot through with dark and light. Such an amazing time to come alive. Feel the privilege of that. Feel the companionship of the ancestors and future beings who are there to support us because this moment is a crucial link in a very long story.

Thank you.

Thank you! What wonderful questions! (laughs)

Then it was the sending off or something where we put some seeds into a bag.

Then supper, now some off you may think that I disliked the food, that is a terrible misunderstanding for I loved the food and there where just one or two times when I got there late and there for only got half the meal and therefore it wasn’t very satisfying, but anyway today we had lasagne again and it was lovely.

Plz leave comments
thx Rowan

I was continually touched by the organizers’ attention to detail. The vases of flowers and the candles everywhere. The inclusion of ritual in the day’s events. The frequent invitations to move, to sing, to dance, to soak in the hot-tub, it was John Croft’s advocation that ecological projects need to celebrate regularly and enthusiastically given form.

Being around the beautiful buildings, with the 4 wind turbines majestically overseeing the whole place, the community of people living scantly paid but deeply fulfilling lives, gave one a sense of what is possible. It is also a taste of what a lower energy world might look like if we actually pull it off.

The conference drew together some wonderful people, and as at any event, much of the most stimulating conversation took place over a bottle of local organic ale in the Blue Moon café at the end of each day. For me personally, it was an opportunity to unwind and restimulate, after an exhausting few weeks. It was also an opportunity to top up on inspiration and insight, and to feel held by this rapidly emerging movement rather than feeling the need to hold it. It exposed me to the fascinating work that Richard Olivier is doing around leadership and mythodrama, and to create a space for the depth of work Joanna Macy is doing.

It was also a really precious opportunity to see my son flower in that environment, be stimulated by the week beyond my wildest expectations, and to see how deeply some of what we did touched him. We headed home with a box of ‘It’s Easy Being Green’ books and another box of low energy bulbs for his classmates, and with his having determined to return to Findhorn with some of his friends. A quite wonderful few days, and I offer deep thanks to the organizers, to the other presenters, and to all the wonderful people I met there drawn from the 4 corners of the Earth.

The final day began with rain driving on the bedroom window. This extraordinary week at Findhorn had offered us a year’s worth of weather in one week. Snow, sleet, an odd kind of snow I’ve never seen before that looked more like polystyrene pellets than actual snow and that actually bounced when it hit the ground, sun warm enough for people to lie on the grass to soak it up, hard frost, strong chill winds and now, driving rain.

After doing our packing, it was off to the Universal Hall for Richard Heinberg’s talk, ‘Resilient Communities. Paths for Powering down; an exercise in strategic thinking’. Once again the Findhorn blogger has done a wonderful job of creating an accurate record of this, so I will instead offer my reflections.

His talk was underpinned by 8 assumptions. The first was that global oil production are nearing an all time maximum and will begin to decline within the next 18-24 months, with gas and coal peaks not far behind. The second was that the consequences, as identified in the Hirsch Report, will be severe.

Assumption 3 is that there will be no technofix, no silver bullet that will mean that business as usual can continue. Therefore, Assumption 4 continues, we will have to power down. Assumption 5 was that in the meantime, climate change poses thorny policy challenges where everyone wants to be seen to be doing the right thing, but enormous economic interests stand in the way of enforcing effective global agreements, which without China and the US will be ineffective.

His sixth assumption is that Climate Change makes global Powerdown necessary, whereas Peak Oil means it is not only possible but unavoidable. The seventh is that the powering-down process will be complex, lengthy, and perilous, and his final assumption was that these are not the only looming crises –nor even necessarily the most imminent. It may well be that a financial crash, already beginning, will affect us first.

He gave an overview of the emerging responses, the bottom up approaches such as Transition Initiatives, Relocalisation Outposts, and so on, and of the top down responses, such as Post Carbon cities and local government plans such as the Oakland Peak Oil Task force, of which he is a member.

Richard then unveiled a concept which he has been evolving and of which this was the first public airing. He calls it the Resilient Communities Action Plan (a careful assembly of those 4 letters that could so easily have gone horribly wrong). The idea is that it is something that is a companion to the Energy Descent Action Plan, but it is different, it is, in effect, an emergency response plan, a Plan C to the EDAP’s Plan B. It would be created by a working group within a Transition Initiative or a Post Carbon group, and would sit alongside the main plan as an emergency response that could be taken off the shelf when required.

While crisis can equal opportunity, he argued, it may not necessarily yield the kind of opportunity we are talking about here. In the past, crises have produced Hitler, and the kind of insidious undermining of economies that Naomi Klein set out in her (enormous) book Shock Doctrine.

This plan would involve many of those who have relevant knowledge and would be made very visible to the community at large. He unveiled, with a tip of the hat to the 12 Steps of Transition, his 10 Steps to a Resilient Community. They were;

1. Form a working group
2. Identify people and organizations with something important to offer post-peak
3. Ask their help and participation
4. Work with them to develop a contingency plan in their field: how to scale-up quickly?
5. Seek input from disaster management officials
6. Contact mainstream organizations responsible for water, food, power, fuel, health care, etc.
7. Assemble a coherent Resilience Plan
8. Present the plan
9. Implement the plan
10. Work with other communities to create a national plan: repeat steps 1-10 at higher levels
    

Most response groups, he argued, cultivate an upbeat, hopeful tone, which is essential. In contrast, creating this kind of disaster management is a sobering activity–but it is strategically and practically necessary. Somebody’s got to do it!

As with many things that arise from hearing Richard speak, one often needs time to go off and digest these ideas for a while. My initial thought is that this could be possible as a subset of the EDP process, and could be something that could emerge from the material gathered. However, it felt to me, from what Richard said, that it involved the creation of a panel of experts, and that the danger with that approach is that the community feels no sense of involvement in the plan itself.

I can see his argument that, in effect, our Energy Descent Plans need to maximize their resilience as it were, as in they can be as robust in the face of a rapidly onsetting breakdown as in a more gentle transition. My initial sense is that rather than having a separate process, that the creation of an EDP should involve the continual assessment as to how its recommendations would hold up in the face of a sudden shock. I guess that the proof of the pudding will be in the eating, as in in a couple of months when we begin the Totnes EDAP process formally, we will bear that in mind and see how it might fit in. Richard was, as ever, authoritative and passionate, clear and forward thinking.

The next speaker was Richard Lochhead, the local MSP (you can read the Findhorn blogger’s version here). He was introduced as a politician who finally was starting to talk the right talk. He announced that ‘sustainable economic growth’ (which by this point in the conference most delegates recognized as an oxymoron) was at the heart of their policy making. They are committing to an 80% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050 (a 20% improvement on Westminster), and he announced a Climate Change Fund for communities which will give out £17 million over the next 3 years.

He said he was delighted recently to have spoken at the launch of Transition Town Bigga, and is very supportive of Transition Initiatives in Scotland. His dedication to community empowerment, he said, is not just jargon, it is the real thing.

He is aiming (I forget by when) for 50% of energy to be coming from renewable, and that a Scottish renewable energy revolution has more chance of success if it comes from the bottom up rather than top down. His department would be offering £13.5 million for the support of microgeneration, and would make the installation of renewables in schools a priority.

His talk was a mixture of vision and pragmatism. As so often at amazing conferences such as Positive Energy, it is a shame when politicians are just dropped into the event, not having shared the experiences and the learning process that those at the conference have undergone. In questions, he was asked for his view on aviation, which he replied by saying that he was supportive of expansion of air travel, as Scotland was starting from a low base and needed to catch the rest of the UK up a bit.

He was questioned on the term ‘sustainable economic growth’, and replied that if a renewable revolution is to take place, and if that manufacturing is to take place in Scotland, that needs an economy that is growing. Asked how deeply peak oil is reflected in his thinking and policies, he replied that he was aware they still had a lot further to go.

After lunch was a very touching closing ceremony, and then, after a final walk around Findhorn with my camera, supper. Then Rowan and I were off to the station and onto our night sleeper home, a much more restless night’s sleep than on the way up.

The second session was my Dad. The third was.. Nah I’m just kidding I am gunner talk about my Dads session, well if I was there I would have, but I wasn’t.

Okay so on to the third session; Ummm, I was in bed, then I went for a walk and then dropped in on the last bit of some random dudes talk, I have absolutely NO idea what on earth he was bantering on about but I was there for two minutes and went to noddy land (I fell asleep).

For the last sesh I went for a quite stroll along the beech. It was very windy. The day ended with me buying some bacon and then going to supper at which we had a lovely Indian. Tomorrow is my last post, so ill appreciate any comments.
Thx Rowan

Seeing as the official Findhorn blogger is doing a far more sterling effort at actually capturing some kind of a reliable record of events, and my derisory efforts are both a fraction of theirs and are also taking lots of time that I probably ought to be spending chilling out on the beach and generally not communing with my laptop, I will offer more my reflections than a verbatim account.

Megan Quinn works for Community Solution in the US, and was involved in the making of the Power of Community film. She is also wonderful in that she represents the next generation of speakers on this topic, well informed, passionate about the subject and a gifted speaker. Her talk looked at the strategy that Community Solution are developing, which they call Curtailment and Community.

Curtailment is the dramatic reduction in consumption, and is a more realistic term than the rather fuzzy ‘sustainability’. The time has come to ask what we actually want to use fossil fuels for? Does it make sense to use them to sustain something inherently unsustainable? Even if we could sustain all this, say if a new energy source were found, should we?

She went on to explore the difference between change by choice and change imposed from outside, talking about Cuba, and how those changes were imposed by necessity, and although some of them, such as urban food production, have stayed, the move to bicycles was shortlived once the petrol started to flow again.

She mused on why change has been so slow, attributing it to the degree of denial out there and to what she called the Saviour Mentality, the belief that someone will come riding to our rescue. Future generations will come to rely, she argued, not on national security, rather on community security.

We need to be realistic about where we can affect the most change, she argued. Green new build will only be a fraction of the housing stock, retrofitting is much more important, it needs to be low tech and low cost. In terms of transport, hybrids won’t make a great difference, sharing your car with 3 other people is far more efficient than any hybrid on the road!

In terms of food, the farmers of the future will be respected above all other careers. Indeed, it is the whole system that needs overhauling, we need to replace the industrial model with the local. What, she asked, is community? Community is the benefit, it is what we get, when we consume less and are happier.

We are still separated from neighbours and life has become such an abstraction, if we could walk through the clearcut forests or the sweatshops of China, we would change our practices, yet it is all still very abstract. Yet as people lose confidence they still perceive that they have no alternative, yet community will become their only source of security. When our focus shifts to the local, it becomes about sharing and conserving scarce resources rather than having a perception of seemingly abundant global resources.

There is a perception that in Cuba the changes were all state driven, yet 80% of agriculture is now organic, they are decentralising energy production to the community, and the reality is that Cubans didn’t wait for their Government, they just got on with it, and the State had to help. This change will not come from Governments, it will start with those who are inspiring others.  (You can read the official blog account of her talk here).

Jonathan Dawson has been a long term resident of Findhorn and is the President of the Global Ecovillage Network. His talk was called “Moving Outside the Bubble: the Ecovillage Contribution to the Sustainability Movement”. Ecovillages, he argued, are places of vision, and are generally the product of pretty stubborn people. They exist in service of something different from themselves.

Findhorn recently had its ecological footprint assessed and it was a fraction of the national average, in part due to the fact that people don’t need to commute (because, he said, they are paid so little they can’t afford to!). Perhaps a better way to think of eco-villages, he mused, was like the Irish monasteries of Glendalough and Skellig Michael. They are places where people can take time out to breathe and to find inspiration.

Many of the ecovillages that now exist began in the 70s and early 80s, when planning was more relaxed and land much cheaper. The paradox now is that they have never been more influential, yet never harder to do. Findhorn which 10 years ago was off the map as far as local Government was concerned, is now much more accepted.

So, as monasteries, ecovillages are places of deep refuge where you can stop, which are beautiful, safe and holding. They are a place where one can step aside from the concerns of daily life, and reimagine what we are for. They are also research, demonstration and training centres, and as such are more like monasteries than villages.

He closed with the quote that opens the Kinsale Energy Descent Plan, “if you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work; but, rather, teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea”. In terms of looking at the difference between Findhorn and BedZed in this context, we could see BedZed as a boat yard, and Findhorn as a dream factory.

The conference was joined by videoconference by students in Sweden, who were able to ask questions. The idea had been to have Sao Paolo too, and a couple of other places, but they didn’t work. A great way of bringing people in from elsewhere.

The afternoon was all Open Space, and I disappeared to prepare for my talk today. I did make the final session which was a networking session where people arranged themselves in terms of where they come from geographically. It is wonderful being here with such enthused, positive people, and the event itself has been designed with enough space built into it that it does not feel too intense and overwhelming. By the end of the day, I had my presentation sorted for the next day, and was able to have a relaxed couple of bottles of ale in the cafe to wrap up the day.

1. Sleep.
2. Sleep again.
3. And a bit more for good measure.
4. Wake up at about 12 and stumble into a freezing shower
5. I am now fully awake (the shower helped, it reminded me of being hit in the :— by a ball).
6. Breakfast. For breakfast I munched once again on a refreshing bowl of apple and cornflakes, Mmmm, seriously it is quite nice.
7. I then headed to the Universal Hall for some Open Space; it was cool by the way.
8. The first bit was how to do public speaking; which was cool. Although and I learnt some new tic tacks.
9. The second was how to bring the youth involved, obviously I am a youth and I am involved but many are not so if your reading this go out and pick up some rubbish and do eco stuff like.. Ye just improvise something.
10. I then tried to do my washing,
11. I find out I need soap things and tokens, sssh yep that really went well.
12. I then go to have food.
13. I got there a bit late and there for my meal consisted of a very appetising dish of brown rice and carrots covered in a liquid resembling gravy, the word ‘mank’ just would not do it justice and it tasted like something that had congealed in a gutter somewhere.

By the way the pic is of the drama thing yesterday.
Thx for comments yall. Lol I met an American who spoke like that and I laughed and he didn’t talk to me again… oh well.

In the second session we told the group what we thought of the character or place we chose (we did it in groups by the was), in the second part of the second session we talked about how we describe ourselves now and how we will in the future.  We then created to catch phrases and freeze frames for each and how to transition between the two.

Usually I comment on something funny, the food or one of the sessions but today it was a great session and we had lasagne, which was lush!  So the funniest thing that happened to day was that I saw a cat fall off a wall, which was quite funny, for its not a sight you witness on many occasions, he must have been at the Scottish whiskey.

In answer to a comment left on yesterday’s blog, most people were nude and I haven’t been to the living machine yet.
Here is me with a lovely man from Japan called Hide who is from Japan and I believe is Jin from Lost’s long lost brother. See above and right for comparison.

Thx for the comment, ill be posting again tomorrow…

The session began with his taking us through the play, telling the story and introducing its main characters. It is so easy to kill Shakespeare and make it dry and uninteresting, but as an extremely gifted actor he was able to bring it to life. He pulled out some amazing quotes from the play. One was from the Old Duke, who had been in a position of high authority but was then banished to the woods where he lived simply and had developed a deep connection to Nature.

He says “these rough elements are counsellors that feelingly persuade me what I am”. When the hero, Orlando, arrives in the woods, he is armed and expecting trouble. When he meets the Old Duke, it becomes clear that there is no threat, no danger, and he says “I blush, and hide my sword”.

Later Richard talked about two things that we need in order to be successful in the Great Turning, alignment and atonement. Alignment is about the parts of a system being in line with each other, being connected and in sympathy. At its best this means efficiency, at its worst it means rigid systems that prioritise profits above people. Often highly aligned systems don’t listen and can prevent change.

Atunement Richard defined as a resonance or harmony between the parts of a system and between the parts and the whole. Highly attuned systems can also be very ineffective as they aren’t able to actually make things happen. We need both. The problem is how to move from highly aligned to highly attuned systems. When you remove a dictator for example, a highly aligned system, what happens? Chaos and breakdown. At least aligned systems maintain order, without a gentle transition we end up with chaos and rampant individualism.

The issue of sustainable leadership is about how to bridge between the two, but getting the two into an appropriate relationship is very difficult. He then identified some of the key characters and some of the key parts of the story, and invited us to chose those that spoke to us. We then, in our groups, though about our part and what it meant. Then we all came back together after lunch and fed that back. For each of the stages he had exercises that we all worked on together ( for a far more thorough account of this workshop than my shabby efforts have a look at the official Findhorn blog here).

Mythodrama is an amazing tool, and using Shakespeare as the basis for it is very dynamic, given the degree and depth of the symbolism that Shakespeare worked into his plays, which offer a rich seam to be mined. It was a workshop that leant itself to being experienced rather than being written about, all I can say here to do it justice is that it is a very deep and powerful approach that may well have a very powerful place to play in Transition work and in the building of new leadership. I hope to do an interview with Richard while I am here, so that might hopefully give a clearer idea of Richard’s work than my ramblings above.

The afternoon session focused on Seeing with New Eyes. For this session, Joanna gave an overview of systems thinking, arguing that the time of the Great Turning will be a time of a return to a deep understanding, to what Tich Naht Hanh calls ‘Interbeing’. When we go out into the world to take our part in the Great Turning, we need more than just our feelings, they come and go, we also need a grounding in the new comprehension of the world that is emerging in systems thinking.

She then gave a deep and thorough introduction, which she called “a condensed version of a university semester in systems thinking”. Unfortunately, given that it was the session just after lunch, and there was one part of it where my eyelids reached excessive levels of droopiness, and also the fact that the official Findhorn conference blogger is doing a much better job than I am, I will, for this session, and in order to do what Joanna said justice, put a link here to her write up of this session.

The next session began with the following poem;

A Thousand Years of Healing

From whence my hope, I cannot say,
except it grows in the cells of my skin,
in my envelope of mysteries it hums.
In this sheath so akin to the surface of the earth
it whispers. Beneath
the wail and dissonance in the world,
hope’s song grows. Until I know
that with this turning
we put a broken age to rest.
We who are alive at such a cusp
now usher in
one thousand years of healing!

Winged ones and four-leggeds,
grasses and mountains and each tree,
all the swimming creatures,
even we, wary two-leggeds
hum, and call, and create
the Changing Song. We remake
all our relations. We convert
our minds to the earth. In this turning time
we finally learn to chime and blend,
attune our voices; sing the vision
of the Great Magic we move within.
We begin
the new habit, getting up glad
for a thousand years of healing.

© – Susa Silvermarie

She began by picking up the poem’s theme of 1000 years of healing, and the need to see with new eyes. We need to broaden our context of time, the context in which we see this work. We call this Deep Time work. If we could experience ourselves as part of the journey,we would perhaps deal with things like radioactive waste in very different ways. Our human chapter is so recent, yet we are doing things with such long implications. Depleted uranium shells, used routinely in Iraq, creates a radioactive waste that is so fine, so light, that the slightest wind picks it up and wafts it around. We can see our relation to time in this material, with its half life of four and a half billion years.

So we discount the future and those that follow us, and in the main we have become compliant in this. The way our culture experiences time is unprecedented, fragmented, it is making us suffer. We all feel increasing time pressure, less time to think, to be, to vision, to spend with family, to be in our gardens.

Market forces, the industrial growth society can’t just continue but must accelerate. It drives itself in a positive feedback loop. The pressure is always to speed up, speed up. For the first time in history time is measured in such small bits of time that we can no longer actually experience them, nanoseconds. Deep Time work is an antidote to that, the realisation that we belong to so much more than just this moment. The future ones are within us, within our ovaries, our gonads and our DNA, and we can become aware of their thanks and gratitude.

We then did the exercise of meeting the Seventh Generation, where the group formed into two rings, both facing each other. One took the role of someone now, here, today, in the Great Turning, and the other took the role of someone from the 7^th generation hence, in 2208, in a time where humanity had made it, had arrived. We then asked each other questions about how that time had been and what inner resources had sustained us though that time. It was a very moving practice.

Joanna’s final session brought us round to the y to care, and the wellspring of the intention can guide your every step. It is important to know that uncertainty and risk taking will take you forth, but there is only one thing you can count on in this. Your intention. Put it behind your ear, in your heart, anywhere, but cherish it. There are huge evolutionary forces at work because this is the time of the Great Turning. It can of course break our hearts, but it breaks them open so they can fit the entire universe in.

Fran then read a beautiful life-affirming poem, after which we replied “May It Continue!” which I will try and post here.

The last activity was one in groups of four, a new practice she calls “Corbett”, not after 1970s TV funnyman Ronnie Corbett, but after the town in Columbia where the practice evolved. We took it in turns to think of one project we want to do when we get home from this event. We had 2 minutes to talk about that and to introduce it. Then the first person had 2 minutes to be the voice of doubt, to pick apart our proposal and question it. The second person was the voice of the Ancestors, giving their views on our proposal, and the final one gave the view of the future beings. Then we gave a second response having heard all that.

The session finished with a song and then with an Israeli dance of thanks to Joanna, Fran and her team.

Reflections.

Joanna’s approach is so compassionate, so urgent, so skilful, and so desperately needed at this time. It is also beautiful to see her and her relationship with Fran, they have been married for so many years, yet remain so tender with each other. Usually in my work, it is about introducing a challenge and then saying to people “but look, we can get through this, and we could emerge into somewhere wonderful”. The immense power and skill of Joanna’s work is in saying ‘let’s go down into this, let’s connect with the pain of our not knowing, and the tools we need to get through this can be found in that exploration.

She is an amazing creator of space, a dazzling storyteller. The Bowl of Tears ritual was one of the most extraordinary rituals I have ever experienced. To take over 200 people through that ritual and for it to have such a deep power is quite something. As I said before, I have waited over 10 years to do this work with Joanna, and it was worth the wait. An extraordinary experience, one for which I am deeply grateful.